HETEROGENEOUS HARDWARE ACCELERATOR ARCHITECTURE FOR PROCESSING SPARSE MATRIX DATA WITH SKEWED NON-ZERO DISTRIBUTIONS

Heterogeneous hardware accelerator architectures for processing sparse matrix data having skewed non-zero distributions are described. An accelerator includes sparse tiles to access data from a first memory over a high bandwidth interface and very/hyper sparse tiles to randomly access data from a second memory over a low-latency interface. The accelerator determines that one or more computational tasks involving a matrix are to be performed, partitions the matrix into a first plurality of blocks that includes one or more sparse sections of the matrix, and a second plurality of blocks that includes sections of the matrix that are very- or hyper-sparse. The accelerator causes the sparse tile(s) to perform one or more matrix operations for the computational task(s) using the first plurality of blocks and further causes the very/hyper sparse tile(s) to perform the one or more matrix operations for the computational task(s) using the second plurality of blocks.